The video doesn’t say much about costs or alternatives, unfortunately. Germany has managed to get solar PV prices down enormously. However, the usefulness of this is debatable, as solar PV energy is still very far from being competitive with traditional power or even wind.

Also, the progress has come at a staggering cost for the German consumers as well as for the climate. Germany has around 3% solar PV now. For the amount of money they have given out for this and promised to give out over the next decades in FiT, they could have replaced all their lignite generation (some 23% of total generation) with wind power.

For anyone concerned by global warming, Germany may be perceived as kind of a self-sacrificing good samaritan, lowering the costs of others, but Germany’s own record and their near-term plans are very discouraging. They started to effectively replace coal with nuclear power in the early eighties, but shut it down due to TMI and Chernobyl, and now they have decided to focus their renewable efforts in the coming decade on replacing nuclear power. Thus they will, in 2022, have lost some 40 years in terms of combating global warming.

Furthermore, when Germany is done replacing nuclear power with sun and wind, it is unknown if they will be able to integrate more intermittent power in their grid.